Well, I don't know about Civilization, but SimCity was definitely in the Super Nintendo. And the game that started the whole RTS thing, Dune 2, was on the Sega Genesis.
Granted, consoles suffer on these games as well as FPS because of the lack of a keyboard and mouse and the low resolution of TV. These problems will go away in the future when HDTV is adopted and when console developers devise a controller that makes these games more playable. I doubt it will be a keyboard and mouse since that's not a good setup for multiple players sitting around the TV, but I'm sure soemthing will come out.
There are standards out there that aren't owned by any one group that have worked. The inner workings of the Internet and networking are full of examples.
I think the problem is that these standards have a problem with stagnation (SMTP comes to mind). Where closed standards win out is in innovation. For one, there's a profit to be made in making protocols and file formats that outperform others. Second, standards that are made by committee tend to have the problems that are associated with things that are made by committee - the size of ATM cells being a perfect example.
So I don't think we'd get solutions in the forms of standards that actually work - we'd get standards that are close to working the way they should, and folks would figure out how to make the standard work for them. But God save us if the standard needs an update.
You mean that huge slab of slate that you write on with the little white sticks? I don't see why you're so down on it - I always use it in my presentations. So do all my favorite professors. The benefits are endless.
You are free to ad-lib, and if a user asks a question that doesn't fit perfectly with the outline you had originally planned, you can answer it and change the things you say later in your lecture accordingly rather than having to choose between saying "We'll get to that during the Q&A period" (which always makes you look bad) or answering it but derailing your lecture as you realized you already talked about everything on a slide a few steps down the line and having so skip through it (which always makes you look bad).
You can continually talk about your subject material, dealing only with your audience and drawing your visual aids (as you talk, of course), rather than having to keep walking back to the computer (which makes you look bad) or giving the whole lecture with your face lit by a monitors blue glow (which makes you look bad <i>and</i> unattractive).
Visual aids can be modified at whim, giving you more freedom to use visual aids when you answer questions or notice that something needs more explaining, rather than being stuck with only the visual aids you had set up beforehand.
You can give your lecture with the lights on. People who have to take notes will love you for it. It also helps keep people from falling asleep. (Don't laugh. At least in an undergraduate setting, this is an unavoidable problem, and improving your lecture skills only mitigates it.) Also, you don't have to avoid walking from one half of the room to the other to keep from getting blasted in the eyes by the projector's light.
Best yet, you can spend the night before drinking a beer or reading a book or something rather than having to fight with getting that slideshow just perfect.
I'm not saying to never use slides - I use them all the time, but only for stuff that would be impossible time-consuming to reproduce on the blackboard, such as photographs and complicated diagrams. When they aren't needed anymore, off goes the projector.
I'm not sure what wood options you get with these, but some woods aren't much more renewable than mining.
Attempts at replanting logged / burnt tropical rainforests haven't been all that successful, because the ecosystems tend to be so funky and tightly woven.
At least metal is scrappable, although it's been @$%!#%$ hard to find a scrapyard that will take the random chunks of various metals I have lying around since I can't produce anything in any real quantity.
No, no, at the rate at which people use up any resource nowadays, including "renewable" ones, I think we're going to need something that renews a lot faster than trees but can be used for many jobs wood currently serves to make treas really count as renewable. Rate of production has to match rate of consumption; otherwise even petroleum counts as a renewable resource.
I don't know about you, but 25 seconds of crappy tweened advertisements every time you want to get some dough would be enough grounds for me to go find another bank, and to make it perfectly clear to the former bank exactly why you left them.
Granted, I have a history of being uppity with banks. . .
. . . and read their brief overview at the top of the page.
And it almost made no sense to me. Those buzzwords work great one at a time, but the brain starts to make a noise kind of like the one the TV makes after the TV channel goes off the air when you string too many together at once. Especially when nothing but commas separates them.
Did anyone at HP's marketing department take an courses in English at college? Or were they just as non-clueful about what OpenSSI is when they wrote that blurb as I was when I first went to their website?
Someone should tell them Kant already has a patent on writing paragraphs that take as long to read as pages.
If something gets X on a processor at 500mhz, you can with confidence say it will get nearly 2*X with the same kind of processor at 1000mhz.
This is true if your benchmark (or something) is able to effectively isolate the CPU. Otherwise, you have to start worrying about bus latency, page faults, and the speed of everything else in your computer.
There's also a myth that CPU performance equates to the performance of an entire computer. This one has folks going out and buying all-new computers when what they really needed to do was buy more RAM or uninstall RealPlayer, Gator, that weather program, etc.
This myth is definitely supported by Intel, which likes to run ads that imply that buying a Pentium MCCXVI processor will help you get better audio and video streams on that computer that's still dialing into AOL with a 28.8 modem.
If all she wants to do is surf the web and do e-mail, find an old Pismo book. They'll still run OS X just fine - I've spent quite a bit of time on a Pismo powerbook runnin 10.2.3, it wasn't any worse than a newer iBook.) It's plenty fast for surfing the web and all that, and would probably cost about as much as a handheld. Be a lot easier to use, too.
Not to mention that the US's complete lack of regulation on pharmaceutical advertising is a major factor that contributes to the high cost of drugs in America.
All that swag and all those TV commericals and magazine ads do increase sales, but generally not enough to make the advertising pay for itself. So you, the consumer and patient, get to pay for all your doctor's refridgerator magnets, all those "free" samples, and all those TV ads that try to mindfuck you into thinking that you need Paxil because you find stressful situations to be stressful and Depakote because the first day of spring makes you happy.
(This is going to assume that we're still talking about small portable devices like iPods, and not full-size computers.)
The day you get a CD R/W drive small enough and with low enough power consumption to replace HDs and flash memory, go for it. It will probably still be less reliable, since CDRW's don't have the same MTF if you're constantly rereading them and rewriting them. That and it'd kind of suck to have to erase the thing wholesale rather than one file at a time.
Last I checked, flash memory has a shorter MTF than most HDs. I don't know if this has changed recently and I don't know if the same applies to MicroDrives. I do realize that HD's are more fragile. Still, magnetic mediums reign supreme when you need a lot of space for cheap - hence why MicroDrives are taking over in MP3 players, and why many folks still backup fileservers on tapes rather than DVD-R or something like that.
I think the part that a lot of naysayers miss is that 4GB is a pretty good "sweet spot" for many consumers. I get comments on having a large CD collection (which seems strange to me - only ~250 CDs), and while it's too big to fit on an iPod Mini, it's nowhere near filling my 15GB iPod. The mini version is perfect for folks who have more like 100 or 150 CDs and don't mind not encoding them at full bitrate - which I imagine is a good compromise for anyone who isn't into music enough to own a few hundred albums.
True, you can get an extra 11GB for $50 more, but if you don't use that 11GB, that extra 50 bucks is a waste.
All of these would demand that the battery life on most PDAs improves greatly (I know my Tungsten T2 can't handle the strain when I do things like this for very long). That said, none of them seem at all original, most are already implemented, and I'm amazed nobody seems to have thought how much greater these would be on a device with a MicroDrive.
Movies - great for anyone who spends a lot of time on buses, trains, and airplanes Music - Screw PDA cellphones, PDA game systems, and the like. Make a really good PDA/MP3 player. Save me the trouble of having to carry both my Palm and my iPod around everywhere I go. Along the same vein, audiobooks would be nice. Data transfer - That PDA could double as a FlashDrive type thing with much more storage space. Granted, my Palm should do the same thing but apparently PalmOne is too tunnel-visioned to think how useful it would be to make their devices double as SD card readers.
There are so many UI mistakes in OSX compared to MacOS9 that I not sure if Apple was ever thinking about good UI when designing OSX
I'd totally believe it. I love a lot of things about my Powerbook and OS X, but I'm also constantly reminded that, in the Jobs era, apperances reign supreme and intelligent design takes second seat. How else can you explain horrible blunders like Apple's mice, the "See-through" screen on newer PowerBooks, 'drawers' that can only be opened with a keyboard combo or the menubar, NSSchizophrenicTextField controls. ..
Apple is spending all its time focusing on selling its products through the initial "wow" factor while at the same time chronically annoying its existing user base. I switched to Apple less than a year ago and I'm already getting very salty with them over all sorts of little bugs in the hardware and UI that are so glaringly obvious that it seems the only reason they continue to exist is that some manager or hack 'visionary' at Apple decided that usability just isn't as important as whatever the hell factor Apple is using to make major decisions nowadays.
And yeah, I do have a feeling a lot of this is the fault of Steve "solid magnesium case" Jobs.
OpenGL will always be alive as long as there are platforms other than Windows out there. Granted, this guarantees an audience on maybe 1/20 of the computer market.
The big reason game developers on Windows choose DirectX over OpenGL, from what I gather, is that it provides a framework for all sorts of stuff in addition to 3D graphics - sound, networking, etc. Hopefully, as projects like OpenAL mature, this won't be so much of an issue.
In other words, the only thing I think Microsoft is guilty of here is creating a remarkably poor filter.
And being far too innocent to set up a porn search term filter. "hardcore" and "hardcore love" are caught by the filter, while "hardcore ass love" goes right through and gives me "Anal Cravings - Sluts who love it up the ass!" at the top of the list. Who wrote this filter, some reject from an experiment in raising children entirely within the confines of Disney World?
I have no idea what the screen layout is going to be like, but if they're side by side it would be neat if they had a lightweight shutter glasses peripheral or polarized screen covers along with polarized glasses so you could have Virtual Boy the way it should have been.
You can do stereo vision using successive images from a single camera. Granted, this only works if the robot is working at the time, the change in camera position and orientation between images must be known. The Roomba probably doesn't have motion sensors, but there are ways to calculate view parameters using only the images - they're just very computationally complex and not necessarily deterministic. (Usually you get one reasonable set of matrices and a few ones that may not even be physically possible, but it's hard to write software that can figure out which one is correct.)
There is software out there for doing the basic stereo work so you can figure out where obstructions are. Noting that is Free that I know of except for a few GP image processing libraries (Gandalf and TINA, for example), but it isn't too insanely hard to write software that can at least keep the robot from bumping into things on your own. Software that can do actual mapping and navigation with decision making is harder.
When it starts carrying music I'm after. To me the whole point of this electronic format thing is trying to hunt down music that I can't get in stores because the stuff is out of print. Beyond that, I'd rather have CDs since I can't afford an MP3 player and I like to listen to music when I'm not at the computer, too. As it stands, I spend about an hour trying to find something I want every time I get a winning Pepsi cap. I'd try finding new musicians, but the samples they provide are so short there's no way to tell if I'm going to like the song or not - even if it's 2 minutes long and meant for the radio, at least give me a verse and not just a little bit of the hook.
Then again, I'm the kind of musical reject who actually buys Klezmatics CDs and has never actually heard "Hey Ya" all the way through (not through any effort of my own, it's just that I don't listen to the radio that much). I guess I'm really not their target market. But God Forbid I download MP3s of music they haven't published since the 1970s, because somehow copying something they aren't selling is stealing their profits!
Re:External modems, why modems?
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Micro ATX and Linux?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
College town, not college campus. Not everyone in a college town is a student, and not all students live on campus.
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Well, I don't know about Civilization, but SimCity was definitely in the Super Nintendo. And the game that started the whole RTS thing, Dune 2, was on the Sega Genesis.
Granted, consoles suffer on these games as well as FPS because of the lack of a keyboard and mouse and the low resolution of TV. These problems will go away in the future when HDTV is adopted and when console developers devise a controller that makes these games more playable. I doubt it will be a keyboard and mouse since that's not a good setup for multiple players sitting around the TV, but I'm sure soemthing will come out.
There are standards out there that aren't owned by any one group that have worked. The inner workings of the Internet and networking are full of examples.
I think the problem is that these standards have a problem with stagnation (SMTP comes to mind). Where closed standards win out is in innovation. For one, there's a profit to be made in making protocols and file formats that outperform others. Second, standards that are made by committee tend to have the problems that are associated with things that are made by committee - the size of ATM cells being a perfect example.
So I don't think we'd get solutions in the forms of standards that actually work - we'd get standards that are close to working the way they should, and folks would figure out how to make the standard work for them. But God save us if the standard needs an update.
Where can I get this wondrous microwave-putting-twenty-dollar-bill-in-soup device?
You mean that huge slab of slate that you write on with the little white sticks? I don't see why you're so down on it - I always use it in my presentations. So do all my favorite professors. The benefits are endless.
You are free to ad-lib, and if a user asks a question that doesn't fit perfectly with the outline you had originally planned, you can answer it and change the things you say later in your lecture accordingly rather than having to choose between saying "We'll get to that during the Q&A period" (which always makes you look bad) or answering it but derailing your lecture as you realized you already talked about everything on a slide a few steps down the line and having so skip through it (which always makes you look bad).
You can continually talk about your subject material, dealing only with your audience and drawing your visual aids (as you talk, of course), rather than having to keep walking back to the computer (which makes you look bad) or giving the whole lecture with your face lit by a monitors blue glow (which makes you look bad <i>and</i> unattractive).
Visual aids can be modified at whim, giving you more freedom to use visual aids when you answer questions or notice that something needs more explaining, rather than being stuck with only the visual aids you had set up beforehand.
You can give your lecture with the lights on. People who have to take notes will love you for it. It also helps keep people from falling asleep. (Don't laugh. At least in an undergraduate setting, this is an unavoidable problem, and improving your lecture skills only mitigates it.) Also, you don't have to avoid walking from one half of the room to the other to keep from getting blasted in the eyes by the projector's light.
Best yet, you can spend the night before drinking a beer or reading a book or something rather than having to fight with getting that slideshow just perfect.
I'm not saying to never use slides - I use them all the time, but only for stuff that would be impossible time-consuming to reproduce on the blackboard, such as photographs and complicated diagrams. When they aren't needed anymore, off goes the projector.
Quit whining. Men have pubic hair. Get used to it.
I'm not sure what wood options you get with these, but some woods aren't much more renewable than mining.
Attempts at replanting logged / burnt tropical rainforests haven't been all that successful, because the ecosystems tend to be so funky and tightly woven.
At least metal is scrappable, although it's been @$%!#%$ hard to find a scrapyard that will take the random chunks of various metals I have lying around since I can't produce anything in any real quantity.
No, no, at the rate at which people use up any resource nowadays, including "renewable" ones, I think we're going to need something that renews a lot faster than trees but can be used for many jobs wood currently serves to make treas really count as renewable. Rate of production has to match rate of consumption; otherwise even petroleum counts as a renewable resource.
I don't know about you, but 25 seconds of crappy tweened advertisements every time you want to get some dough would be enough grounds for me to go find another bank, and to make it perfectly clear to the former bank exactly why you left them.
Granted, I have a history of being uppity with banks. . .
. . . and read their brief overview at the top of the page.
And it almost made no sense to me. Those buzzwords work great one at a time, but the brain starts to make a noise kind of like the one the TV makes after the TV channel goes off the air when you string too many together at once. Especially when nothing but commas separates them.
Did anyone at HP's marketing department take an courses in English at college? Or were they just as non-clueful about what OpenSSI is when they wrote that blurb as I was when I first went to their website?
Someone should tell them Kant already has a patent on writing paragraphs that take as long to read as pages.
If something gets X on a processor at 500mhz, you can with confidence say it will get nearly 2*X with the same kind of processor at 1000mhz.
This is true if your benchmark (or something) is able to effectively isolate the CPU. Otherwise, you have to start worrying about bus latency, page faults, and the speed of everything else in your computer.
There's also a myth that CPU performance equates to the performance of an entire computer. This one has folks going out and buying all-new computers when what they really needed to do was buy more RAM or uninstall RealPlayer, Gator, that weather program, etc.
This myth is definitely supported by Intel, which likes to run ads that imply that buying a Pentium MCCXVI processor will help you get better audio and video streams on that computer that's still dialing into AOL with a 28.8 modem.
If all she wants to do is surf the web and do e-mail, find an old Pismo book. They'll still run OS X just fine - I've spent quite a bit of time on a Pismo powerbook runnin 10.2.3, it wasn't any worse than a newer iBook.) It's plenty fast for surfing the web and all that, and would probably cost about as much as a handheld. Be a lot easier to use, too.
Not to mention that the US's complete lack of regulation on pharmaceutical advertising is a major factor that contributes to the high cost of drugs in America.
All that swag and all those TV commericals and magazine ads do increase sales, but generally not enough to make the advertising pay for itself. So you, the consumer and patient, get to pay for all your doctor's refridgerator magnets, all those "free" samples, and all those TV ads that try to mindfuck you into thinking that you need Paxil because you find stressful situations to be stressful and Depakote because the first day of spring makes you happy.
(This is going to assume that we're still talking about small portable devices like iPods, and not full-size computers.)
The day you get a CD R/W drive small enough and with low enough power consumption to replace HDs and flash memory, go for it. It will probably still be less reliable, since CDRW's don't have the same MTF if you're constantly rereading them and rewriting them. That and it'd kind of suck to have to erase the thing wholesale rather than one file at a time.
Last I checked, flash memory has a shorter MTF than most HDs. I don't know if this has changed recently and I don't know if the same applies to MicroDrives. I do realize that HD's are more fragile. Still, magnetic mediums reign supreme when you need a lot of space for cheap - hence why MicroDrives are taking over in MP3 players, and why many folks still backup fileservers on tapes rather than DVD-R or something like that.
I think the part that a lot of naysayers miss is that 4GB is a pretty good "sweet spot" for many consumers. I get comments on having a large CD collection (which seems strange to me - only ~250 CDs), and while it's too big to fit on an iPod Mini, it's nowhere near filling my 15GB iPod. The mini version is perfect for folks who have more like 100 or 150 CDs and don't mind not encoding them at full bitrate - which I imagine is a good compromise for anyone who isn't into music enough to own a few hundred albums.
True, you can get an extra 11GB for $50 more, but if you don't use that 11GB, that extra 50 bucks is a waste.
All of these would demand that the battery life on most PDAs improves greatly (I know my Tungsten T2 can't handle the strain when I do things like this for very long). That said, none of them seem at all original, most are already implemented, and I'm amazed nobody seems to have thought how much greater these would be on a device with a MicroDrive.
Movies - great for anyone who spends a lot of time on buses, trains, and airplanes
Music - Screw PDA cellphones, PDA game systems, and the like. Make a really good PDA/MP3 player. Save me the trouble of having to carry both my Palm and my iPod around everywhere I go. Along the same vein, audiobooks would be nice.
Data transfer - That PDA could double as a FlashDrive type thing with much more storage space. Granted, my Palm should do the same thing but apparently PalmOne is too tunnel-visioned to think how useful it would be to make their devices double as SD card readers.
There are so many UI mistakes in OSX compared to MacOS9 that I not sure if Apple was ever thinking about good UI when designing OSX
.
I'd totally believe it. I love a lot of things about my Powerbook and OS X, but I'm also constantly reminded that, in the Jobs era, apperances reign supreme and intelligent design takes second seat. How else can you explain horrible blunders like Apple's mice, the "See-through" screen on newer PowerBooks, 'drawers' that can only be opened with a keyboard combo or the menubar, NSSchizophrenicTextField controls. .
Apple is spending all its time focusing on selling its products through the initial "wow" factor while at the same time chronically annoying its existing user base. I switched to Apple less than a year ago and I'm already getting very salty with them over all sorts of little bugs in the hardware and UI that are so glaringly obvious that it seems the only reason they continue to exist is that some manager or hack 'visionary' at Apple decided that usability just isn't as important as whatever the hell factor Apple is using to make major decisions nowadays.
And yeah, I do have a feeling a lot of this is the fault of Steve "solid magnesium case" Jobs.
OpenGL will always be alive as long as there are platforms other than Windows out there. Granted, this guarantees an audience on maybe 1/20 of the computer market.
The big reason game developers on Windows choose DirectX over OpenGL, from what I gather, is that it provides a framework for all sorts of stuff in addition to 3D graphics - sound, networking, etc. Hopefully, as projects like OpenAL mature, this won't be so much of an issue.
But that plan works with almost any step one -
1. FreeBSD with XFree86
2. ???
3. porn
1. Darwin with Aqua
2. ???
3. porn
1. Windows with. . . umm. . . Windows(?)
2. ???
3. porn
They all work! The only exception I can find is my NextStation, where I had to modify the formula a bit:
1. NEXTSTEP
2. ???
3. 2-bit grayscale porn
In other words, the only thing I think Microsoft is guilty of here is creating a remarkably poor filter.
And being far too innocent to set up a porn search term filter. "hardcore" and "hardcore love" are caught by the filter, while "hardcore ass love" goes right through and gives me "Anal Cravings - Sluts who love it up the ass!" at the top of the list. Who wrote this filter, some reject from an experiment in raising children entirely within the confines of Disney World?
So does "XFree86 X11."
Either this was a joke on the part of some M$ developer, or the person who coded it wasn't very bright.
Not all college students can afford broadband after tuition, books, etc.
I have no idea what the screen layout is going to be like, but if they're side by side it would be neat if they had a lightweight shutter glasses peripheral or polarized screen covers along with polarized glasses so you could have Virtual Boy the way it should have been.
You can do stereo vision using successive images from a single camera. Granted, this only works if the robot is working at the time, the change in camera position and orientation between images must be known. The Roomba probably doesn't have motion sensors, but there are ways to calculate view parameters using only the images - they're just very computationally complex and not necessarily deterministic. (Usually you get one reasonable set of matrices and a few ones that may not even be physically possible, but it's hard to write software that can figure out which one is correct.)
There is software out there for doing the basic stereo work so you can figure out where obstructions are. Noting that is Free that I know of except for a few GP image processing libraries (Gandalf and TINA, for example), but it isn't too insanely hard to write software that can at least keep the robot from bumping into things on your own. Software that can do actual mapping and navigation with decision making is harder.
When it starts carrying music I'm after. To me the whole point of this electronic format thing is trying to hunt down music that I can't get in stores because the stuff is out of print. Beyond that, I'd rather have CDs since I can't afford an MP3 player and I like to listen to music when I'm not at the computer, too. As it stands, I spend about an hour trying to find something I want every time I get a winning Pepsi cap. I'd try finding new musicians, but the samples they provide are so short there's no way to tell if I'm going to like the song or not - even if it's 2 minutes long and meant for the radio, at least give me a verse and not just a little bit of the hook.
Then again, I'm the kind of musical reject who actually buys Klezmatics CDs and has never actually heard "Hey Ya" all the way through (not through any effort of my own, it's just that I don't listen to the radio that much). I guess I'm really not their target market. But God Forbid I download MP3s of music they haven't published since the 1970s, because somehow copying something they aren't selling is stealing their profits!
College town, not college campus. Not everyone in a college town is a student, and not all students live on campus.
Woohoo! Manually parsing binary data to put together pieces of damaged files!
I think an important feature of the issue here would be that life is a lot easier if you never get the junk data in the first place.